1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for message routing. More specifically, the present invention relates to a message routing network for routing messages between applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
Corporate reliance on technology has become more complex and more pervasive. Increasingly, companies are identifying opportunities to extend their core business or cut costs using the Internet. Both trends have put increasing priority on integrating disparate business applications. For this reason, enterprise application integration (EAI) has emerged as a solution for allowing information technology departments to build bridges that are designed to unify their legacy systems into a single enterprise application. Ideally, the creation of this single enterprise application would not require sweeping changes to the underlying structures.
EAI suppliers can be viewed in four categories, by decreasing level of application independence: business process level integrators, process flow automation, data integration tools and data transport. Business process EAI offers a number of advantages over traditional middleware solutions for integrating enterprises. First, business process EAI is alleged to be application independent, allowing it to be used in any heterogeneous environment with a greater degree of reuse. Second, at its higher level of abstraction, business process EAI does not require users and implementers to have a detailed knowledge of each of the underlying technologies.
As many EAI vendors have experienced, the practice of releasing customized connectors (or adapters) for each specific enterprise software package has not proven to be scalable. Scores of adapters need to be built for each vendor (e.g., Oracle, SAP and Peoplesoft). As each supplier releases new versions of their software, EAI vendors find themselves unable to gain traction under the burden of supporting their existing adapters.
Notwithstanding the benefits of EAI, the software costs and resource investments of EAI prevent small-to-medium enterprise (SME) customers from embracing EAI solutions. For SMEs, reliance on application service providers (ASPs) represents an increasingly attractive alternative.
The ASP market is one of the fastest growing segments of the software industry. ASPs make enterprise applications (e.g., human resources administration, recruiting, travel and expense management, sales force automation) available to customers on a subscription basis. Those applications are fully managed and hosted by the ASP, providing significant cost savings to enterprises.
Some ASPs merely host and manage third-party packaged software for their customers (“managed hosters”). Others build new applications from the ground up to take advantage of the benefits and cost-savings of the Web (“webware providers”). Webware providers enjoy the profit margins and operational scalability of consumer Web companies like eBay and Yahoo, while at the same time offering the feature sets of complex enterprise software applications such as Peoplesoft and Siebel.